No, Evangelicals, This will Not Happen: An Open Letter to Trump's Most Rabid Supporters

Dear Rabid Trump Supporters (75% white Evangelicals):

Yes, the image of Donald Trump as the Baby Jesus is incredibly blasphemous, but, then again, so are you. 

Making Trump The “Chosen One” is the next step to deifying a man who has lied consistently and made bullsh*t his raison de etre. 

With Mueller’s team closing in and the media exposing his lies (“I’m a self-made billionaire”, “I have no ties to Russia”, “There was no collusion”). With Trump childishly shutting down government for a Border Wall the majority of Americans do not care about. With Trump’s playing the Christian Right for a fool (“Nobody reads the Bible more than I do”). With these and any crimes he has committed,  the only line of defense for you, to twist yourselves into knots over,  may  be to make him the Second Son of God. 

“The Chosen One” has worn thin, unless in choosing Trump, God’s as bad at vetting as the Republican Party. 

Please, This year’s-long betrayal of Christianity, this insult to God’s integrity must stop. 

And it will stop. As this Presidential Aberration continues to be revealed as a semi-literate grifter mouthing words you want to hear, you will be laughed at and scorned for not seeing the man as he really is/was for over 2 years. And, as Mark Twain said, “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” 

In his wake, You may not get the “Seven Mountains” chance to overtake the government (unless, of course, Mike Pence openly does your bidding which the House of Representatives may have something to say about). 

You may not succeed in abolishing gay rights or abortion, even with “beer-bro” Kavanaugh on the Bench because fallout from Trump’s antics have given pause to the tattered GOP. It may listen to your ministers on a local level, but on a broader and more reasonable scale, the support for your agenda will be weakened. 

You may see other countries respecting us again for ousting a man who was laughed at by the U.N., and managed to offend our allies (do we have any left?). You may even see the world breath a sigh of relief that some form of sanity and development dignity will be restored to the U.S. 

You may even see people who are willing to strive for “Peace in Earth” without depending on the mercurial whims of a narcissistic fool. 

Of course you will again be like a wounded tiger as you were during the Obama Administration, but how many wounds can a tiger take before it succumbs to death? 

The only Christmas Miracle we can hope for at this point is that you come to your senses and realize that in supporting Trump, you sold your Christian soul in return for your agenda: a Christian Only nation, abortion-less , gay-less and blessed by God in its isolation, with only missionaries venturing out to save the rest of the Godless world. 

This miracle is a fantasy, to be sure, more impossible than not. So we can only ask of you on Christmas Day, when you are sitting in your pews and praying for Donald Trump, to PLEASE pause and ask yourself if you’re praying for a man Christianity wants or if you’re praying for the man himself. 

While commemorating the Birth of Christ should you be honoring such a man with your prayers? 

Such a pause is not too much to ask, is it? 

Look at it this way: excluding Trump from your prayers may be the first step in saving you Christian soul. 

Just a thought. 

Merry Christmas. 

PS: I do not normally take so strident and politically motivated a stance on Christmas, but rest assured that I do hope for “Peace On Earth Good Will Towards Men” for everyone.

Dealing With Discouragement In A Trumpian World

Take A Break

In Donald Trump's world, there are only winners and losers. He's made that very clear his entire life. And while not everyone can be a winner in his world, we cannot afford to be losers in ours. Losers being the ones who give up and who are too discouraged to go on. 

"If we give up, he's won," said the boss of a non-profit environment venture I work for. This was said after a particular trying day, when we discovered that homeless people had camped out in our garden and trashed a great deal of it. It was worse than a natural disaster, because we couldn't quite conceive of the motives, but we set about replanting and taking stock of things, hoping that it wouldn't happen again.

Trying not to be discouraged, however, is very hard work. Harder work than replenishing a garden after its been trashed. 

Sometimes we need a break from this hard work. Not giving in, mind you, but just taking a break from the world at large and its Donald Trumps (yes, there are more than one - aaagh!). 

For the last six months, my break has been in a garden of my own, not on my own property, but in back of my building where I and my husband rent an apartment. Many mornings have been spent hauling river rocks from a ravine, afternoons have been used for plantings, watering, building and design. Last year, my efforts won an award from  San Francisco Beautiful, not solely because of the garden, but because its elements have been used in community-building where I live. 

Six years in creation (by myself) have led to a peaceful and even magical sanctuary for my neighbors. It has definitely helped to keep me from being too discouraged and giving in by giving me periodic rests. 

OK. Rest period is over. Now back to writing about this discouraging Trumpian world of ours. 

Humiliator-in-Chief: It All Comes Down To Power, Money, and Unbridled Misogyny

"This is not the man I know."

Those words from Melania Trump were to define her role as the wife of a known philanderer. Were they disingenuous? Probably. The woman reading the script was determined to convey the message, but not forcefully so. People immediately began to wonder what the Trumps' relationship was really like.

Now bits and pieces of the picture are coming to light ... brought to us by scandal.

Giving Trump a "Mulligan"

The  Christian Right brushed aside the Stormy Daniels affair in characteristic fashion: "It was a long time ago. He's definitely changed." They might add: "... and he's going in the direction we want."

Tony Perkins of the Values Voter Summit and far-right hate group Family Research Council says the Christian Right in effect gave Trump a"do-over":

Edward-Isaac Dovere of Politico:

Perkins knows about Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who claimed, in a 2011 interview, that in 2006 she had sex with Trump four months after his wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. He knows of the reports that Daniels (real name: Stephanie Clifford) was paid off to keep the affair quiet in the waning weeks of the 2016 election. He knows about the cursing, the lewdness and the litany of questionable behavior over the past year of Trump’s life or the 70 that came before it.
“We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’” Perkins told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.

The Bunny Hop

“No paper trails for him,” she wrote. “In fact, every time I flew to meet him, I booked/paid for flight + hotel + he reimbursed me.” 

Former Playmate Karen McDougal a man obsessed with his image and keeping their affair quiet. 
She also told how obsessed he was with women:

During the Lake Tahoe tournament, McDougal and Trump had sex, she wrote. He also allegedly began a sexual relationship with Clifford [Stormy Daniels] at the event. ... Another adult-film actress, whose screen name is Alana Evans, claimed that Trump invited her to join them in his hotel room that weekend. A third adult-film performer, known as Jessica Drake, alleged that Trump asked her to his hotel room, met her and two women she brought with her in pajamas, and then “grabbed each of us tightly in a hug and kissed each one of us without asking for permission.” He then offered Drake ten thousand dollars in exchange for her company. (Trump denied the incident.) A week after the golf tournament, McDougal joined Trump at the fifty-fifth Miss Universe contest, in Los Angeles. She sat near him, and later attended an after-party where she met celebrities. Trump also set aside tickets for Clifford, as he did at a later vodka launch that both women attended.

Having so many women in tow at the same time must have been an ego-booster.

And now this

As far back as November of 2002, Trump's penchant for picking the final ten (and the winner) in the Miss Universe Contest he owned, became evident when he pressured judges to pick Miss Russia as the winner.

“According to an individual with firsthand knowledge of the judging of the 2002 Miss Universe pageant, Trump tried to rig the outcome of the international contest to award the prestigious ‘Miss Universe’ title to Vladimir Putin’s then-mistress, Oxana Fedorova,”Oxana Fedorova was, at the time,  rumored to be the mistress of non other than Vladimir Putin.

In his article, "Ten Reasons Why Evangelical Christians Can No Longer Stand With Donald Trump," David Usborne posits that the Evangelical Christian Right will finally cave in to morality in the light of recent scandals, but will they? The myriad number of excuses, "mulligans" and bizarrely contorted theological explanations have taken hold in that community and may last for years. To date, there is no response to the McDougal/Playboy Bunny affair, but such convoluted reasoning may take time to emerge.

Whither Melania?

The woman who never wanted to be First Lady has not spoken publicly about the scandals let alone the humiliation. Living with a black hole of dignity and integrity for so many years, one wonders if her distance from Trump is more the result of countless such situations.

Melania Trump has always been first and foremost a loyal, submissive trophy wife. Donald Trump has power over her; he owns her. To please him, his characterizations of any scandal as fake news must be taken without reservation. It is strange, therefore, that the Christian Right hardly ever focuses on this dutiful wife. There are no pastors rushing to counsel her in her time of stress.

Having lived with a man who used women shamelessly to further business interests, who lied to her time after time about his many infidelities, who demands the utmost loyalty, who used his power over lawyers and tabloids to cover up affairs with "catch and kill" tactics, we have to ask:

In distancing herself, is Melania Trump really acting on her own? WILL she ever act on her own?